They Are Coming for Your Birth Control: “Title X Only Existed So The Country Didn’t Run Out of Food”

Think that anti-choice politicians and activists aren’t trying to outlaw contraception? Think again. Follow along in an ongoing series that proves beyond a doubt that they really are coming for your birth control.

If you had any doubt that the effort to de-fund Planned Parenthood was about trying to cut off contraceptive access for women, rather than “stop fungible funding” of abortion, you can rest easy. Planned Parenthood may be the public target but really, they want to eliminate Title X funding all together. After all, it’s time we started encouraging the country to create more mouths to feed.

Title X was a panic bipartisan measure passed by Congress in 1970 in the middle of the “population bomb” scare, when many lawmakers believed that the only way to prevent the United States from running out of food by the year 2000 was to distribute free contraceptives as widely as possible to women and girls ages 15-44 in “low-income families.”

Title X officially expired in September 1985, but Congress has continued to appropriate money for it in ever-increasing amounts. Regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services require the contraception distribution to be strictly confidential (i.e., no notification of the parents of minor recipients), and define a “family” so as to include “unemancipated minors” desiring contraceptives without their parents’ finding out; according to the HHS regulations, they “must be considered on the basis of their own resources.”